The Seer

by Jordan Reece

  “But the article that went after her . . .”

  Scoth gave him an irritated look, but turned his hand over and interlocked their fingers at the same time. “There was a family kerfuffle going on around the same time as Quay’s murder. The old man was sick of seeing Yvod’s name in the papers for acting like a hooligan, and was tired of paying all his court fees. Yvod couldn’t go three months without getting into fresh trouble, and his grandfather was shelling out left and right to shut people up and lower his sentences. What was printed in the papers was nothing compared to what the old man paid to keep out of them. He wanted Yvod to show initiative, get involved in the family business or take a job elsewhere. Just do something more than drinking and fighting and whoring, and costing his grandfather money. Torrus Kodolli has worked every day of his life for well over sixty years, and he can’t stand that his own grandson hasn’t worked a single day ever. He cut off Yvod and Grance both. They were receiving extremely generous allowances on a monthly basis.”

  “Why Grance as well?”

  “Same reason minus the trouble. The old man makes money and those two do nothing but spend it, whether it’s on court fees or jewelry shopping or ritzy vacations. He wanted them to take some pride in themselves, learn the value of a dollar, because one day the company will pass on to them. But Yvod couldn’t even graduate from university, he failed out of three different schools, and Grance graduated but she’s never shown any interest in picking up the torch. They don’t want to work like they see their grandfather and father do. They’re spoiled rotten since the cradle. Anything they’ve ever wanted, they’ve gotten. Up until their grandfather cut off their allowance in the hopes that it would propel them to become adults.”

  “It didn’t,” Jesco observed.

  “It didn’t,” Scoth repeated. “It was too late for that. Until he brought down the hammer on their allowance, Grance had just been handling a little rucaline. It was something she got involved in when she and Yvod were at Nuiten. It wasn’t so much about the money for her as it was the thrill. The thrill of outwitting law enforcement; the thrill of getting away with it. She slipped it into the country and gave it to the dealer, who did the dirty work on the streets and handed back a stack of bills. After she lost her family money, she got married fast to the wealthiest man she could convince to put a ring on her finger. That won her a beautiful home in Melekei and plenty of money to spend, but not the exponential amounts that she was accustomed to living upon. She expanded her rucaline business greatly as a result.”

  “The neighbor heard the husband complaining about how much she spent.”

  “The Dolganges are a rich family, but they live rather on the modest side compared to how they could. She’d run through the money Dircus gave her, run through her rucaline money, and be at loose ends until more came in. She has entire storage spaces around Melekei and Cantercaster filled with clothes and furniture and jewelry. She has to eat at the best restaurants and stay in the most expensive rooms at the finest hotels. She grew up like that and that’s how she intended to keep living. That was how she went from one dealer to twelve, and she had plans to take it further than that. And no, the husband doesn’t know a thing about the rucaline, before you ask. She kept him in the dark, as well as her father and grandfather, and everyone in her social circle save her brother. Rucaline was the perfect business to her perspective: she did very little yet made money hand over fist, just as long as she didn’t get caught. And then Yvod interrupted the system of delivery to bring it to her house personally the day of the party.”

  “She panicked,” Jesco said.

  “She adores the thrill, but she’s no fool. She knows damn well what happens to rucaline distributors. She and Yvod were looking at life imprisonment. She wanted it gone and paid Jibb handsomely to take it away. But then he came back and she killed him.” Scoth shook his head. “She’s one of the cold ones. Stone cold. There’s no heart beating behind that breast, that’s for certain. Her father was distraught at times in his interrogation; her brother showed some worry, although most of it was for himself. He didn’t know that Hasten Jibb got murdered that night. But she was flat when she talked. Completely flat. Committing murder was nothing to her. She doesn’t care a whit about who Jibb was. He just got in her way. That people lose their minds on rucaline is nothing to her either. Then they shouldn’t have taken it. That’s how she thinks. It’s not her problem. She wrapped up the body, sent it off with her father in the carriage, and that was that.”

  “Mercy,” Jesco pleaded. “Tell me about the timepiece.”

  Scoth sighed and acquiesced. “As she went back into the party to suggest a bonfire, Morgan Kodolli went off with Jibb’s body. He had no idea that Hasten Jibb was actually a courier. He had taken his daughter’s word for it that this was just a homeless, crazed bum wandering naked around Melekei who had attempted to assault his daughter. Melekei has had a lot of problems with miscreants, problems that they’ve been trying to quash with more security at the outskirts of the city. Morgan rolled out of Melekei, looking for a place to dump Jibb and not wanting to take the body to those fields and bury it. Then he’d have to involve his father in this. And as he was sitting within the carriage, he had an idea.”

  Scoth took a moment to stretch and Jesco glowered at him. “He knew that Kyrad Naphates was up for that liaison position, but it was a lot more personal than that. After Cluven Naphates died all those years ago and she inherited, the old man offered to buy the mines and she refused. So he ordered his son to bedazzle her. Morgan was a strapping young buck at the time, and his father didn’t think it would take much to sweep a silly girl off her feet.”

  Kyrad stirred within Jesco’s memories. She adored her entertainments, that much was true, yet there was nothing silly about her. “But she was quite determined to not get married again.”

  “And that doomed him to failure in his attempt to woo. He pulled out all the stops: flowers and gifts in the post, poems at a party and a fancy dinner just for two. She was the most beautiful woman in Ainscote, she had the company his father was after, and Morgan wanted her badly. He thought they would be the sharpest couple in the country, splashed on the front page of society papers, and invited everywhere to meet the best people. But his dreams came to nothing. She didn’t want him back. As the son of the man who owns Agrea, he’s not used to women who say no. All he’s ever had to do is flash his last name and his wealth, and women fight to be on his arm. He was handsome once but nothing to look at now, yet that’s true to this day. Kodolli is a magic word. He’s proud of who he is.

  “Still, for all his pedigree and money, he couldn’t catch Kyrad. He confessed his devotion at that fancy dinner and she laughed in his face. She suspected what he was about and she wanted no part of him either in her bed or in her company. Decades later, Morgan Kodolli is still hearing her laugh. He hates her for so much more than business. Some trashy girl from a miner’s family turning him down! That’s been cutting at him for all these years. He got married, had children, hasn’t seen Kyrad in years, but he’s still burning with rage that she rejected his proposal.”

  Jesco had been within minds like that, fuming over slights long after everyone else had forgotten about them. “She was under no obligation to marry him just so he could fulfill those fantasies about being in the papers and rubbing elbows with former royalty.”

  “That’s how a normal person views it, Jesco. That isn’t how he views it. He was doing her an honor. She was nothing; he was everything. He was going to win his father’s approval through wedding her as well. She was the ticket to his future. For everything that he hasn’t accomplished in his own life since then, he lays it at her feet. The moment she laughed was the moment everything went wrong for him. He was practically spitting on the table in the station as he spoke, and I had to pretend it was all very logical to keep him going. He’s the reason the Rosendrie South Press published that nasty little article about her partying a few years ago. He hadn’t attended the party hi
mself, but heard about it from someone who did. The article was his way to draw some blood, to get his pound of flesh from her, but that didn’t work out. No one cared. That infuriated him. She holds a supremely important position in his head-”

  “Yet in no one else’s,” Jesco finished.

  “He doesn’t see that. It was a bit rich to hear him savage her in the interrogation room for accidentally showing her brassiere when he himself attends sex parties at the home of his own daughter.”

  Finally, finally, it was coming together. “Morgan got the timepiece from the storage office!”

  “Yes. He was almost to Cantercaster and still looking for a place to dump the body when it came to him. How to get a real revenge on her all these years later. He reprogrammed the autohorse to go to the office, where he let himself in and dug around the boxes to retrieve the case. It was still there, exactly where his father had kicked it.”

  “But it was that timepiece that led us to him and his family! He may as well have drawn us a map to him!”

  Delicately, Scoth said, “There’s a reason that the old man hasn’t handed over the reins of the company to him, I’d say. Morgan . . . it became clear as we were talking that he just doesn’t have the same horsepower.” Scoth tapped his forehead. “He isn’t a clever man. This was his logic: he and his father had never touched the timepiece, so what was a seer going to get from it? Quay even said that he had barely touched it himself. It had sat in the case with the lid closed since it was given to him. What would a seer see except Kyrad Naphates and Tallo Quay, who was now dead and no one had ever come looking for him or reported him missing? Morgan got the timepiece and thought about where would be best to leave the body. Rosendrie is south of Cantercaster, and that was why he took the body all the way down to Wattling to be within a few miles of her home.”

  “Did he know that he was in Poisoners’ Lane?”

  “Not at first. It was night, and all he had for light in that area was the lantern he keeps in his carriage and another embedded in the chest of the autohorse. He wandered around Wattling, driving the horse manually and seeking a block where no one was hanging around, and eventually ended up in the dead zone. By the time he figured out where he was, he thought it might work to his advantage. There was absolutely no one around to witness him get the body from the carriage. He dragged Jibb into the alley and hung the timepiece from that nail to make it look like it had been dragged from a pocket by its chain. He never let it touch his bare skin.”

  “Which was why I only had vague impressions.”

  “He thought he was being brilliant with where he left the body. Anywhere else and someone likely would have swiped the timepiece. But in Poisoners’ Lane? Very few people go in there, and pretty much always just to walk through. No one is going to pick up a timepiece from there. He was guaranteed that it would still be in that alley near the body by the time the police arrived.

  “As for Jibb, he had been clumsily wrapped in a throw from Grance Dolgange’s house. It was saturated with his blood and came off while he was being dragged. Morgan took it further down the alley, put a heavy rock in it and tied it shut with a cord left on the ground. He threw it in the river. The blade, too. Then he drove away into the night unobserved, passed back through Wattling and went home. There’s nothing remarkable about his autohorse or carriage, so he didn’t stand out to anyone. The timepiece would be found in the police search, he trusted, and the police force with a seer would link it to Kyrad Naphates. He had one of his bodyguards stake out the road going to her home. Once we went past and the bodyguard got confirmation from a servant of hers that it was the police, Morgan had that article run in the South Press. It did what he wanted: blew her chance of getting the liaison position, associated her name with an unsolved murder, and reminded everyone how she runs through escorts.”

  Jesco was astonished. “That was an awfully big risk he took all to settle an old score. An old score that didn’t even matter to anyone!”

  “It mattered to him. He’d also been drinking at Grance’s party, and drank more in his carriage. Something too risky when sober can seem like a great idea with a respectable amount of alcohol flowing through the veins. He wanted to make problems for Naphates, and he did. But he made a lot more for himself. In fact, in his efforts to stir the pot a little for Kyrad, I’d say he just brought down his entire family.”

  “Did you ask him about the attack outside Somentra?”

  “I did. Morgan recognized the photograph of Hasten Jibb and went into a blind panic that we were linking them. The timepiece, too, and Tallo Quay. He sent those riders after us with orders to kill, and believed it would be several days before the wreck was noticed. That isn’t a heavily traveled road. He informed Grance that the police were drawing lines between the body and their family, and they decided the best thing to do was to quit Ainscote. The sea is against them for a little while longer, however, so they took their time in getting down to Port Adassa. They’ve got homes in the Sarasasta Islands and also in Brozzo, lots of money in foreign banks. We don’t have an extradition agreement with Brozzo, and the island authorities won’t be in any rush. Yvod and Grance started south, and Morgan wrapped up some loose financial ends, packed up his things to get mailed to his foreign homes, and did the same. They traveled separately and arranged to meet at yesterday’s train. He intended to find the next freight headed for Brozzo or the islands and purchase passage. It never occurred to them that the police might be on their tails. Hasten Jibb was just a courier, after all.”

  Scoth settled back in the chair in satisfaction. “We’ll dig up those fields behind the old man’s house and get him and the bodyguards on multiple counts of murder. We’ve got Morgan on multiple charges of being an accessory, and attempted murder in our two cases since he hired those riders. We’ve got Yvod Kodolli on rucaline distribution, and his sister on that plus the murder of Jibb. All the money and lawyers in the world won’t save them now. It’s a good day.”

  “It really is,” Jesco agreed. “Maybe Kyrad will make an offer on Agrea.”

  Scoth laughed. “Maybe she will. And maybe my suspension won’t be too long. I’m about to hand the captain a stack of arrests that will rock all of Ainscote. Every newspaper from coast to coast is going to have this story on the front page. It will be a storm.”

  It was hard to imagine that when everything here was so tranquil. “But not yet.”

  “Not yet,” Scoth said, tipping his head. His eyelids were drooping shut from fatigue. All of the tension was gone from him, as so rarely happened. In moments he was asleep, his hand still in Jesco’s.

  Jesco watched the waves come in, fully within his own mind and memories, and all of his strength returning. Within each crest before it broke, the sun was reflecting upon infinite stars.

  Epilogue

  Jesco slipped back into the calm rhythms of the asylum, where life moved at a slower, more reflective pace. The gardener continued his never-ending battle with the flowers and foliage, doomed to lose in the loveliest way. The children circled around Jesco for attention as they always did, Nelle wanting to sit in his lap and the older ones requesting tales of murder and whirly-gig demonstrations.

  A letter came from Isena, who had been shocked and proud to see his name in the papers connected to the case. His nephews had taken the article to school to show their friends, and now all of the little fellows wanted to meet this seer who solved crimes. Her postscript reported that she had visited their parents and siblings recently. While nothing had changed with their mother and father in South Downs when it came to Jesco, and she doubted anything ever would, she wanted him to know that Lyall sent his well wishes.

  Lyall. They had been the best of friends until Jesco’s seer abilities came over him. That changed them into enemies. To have well wishes from an older brother who used to beat him was an extraordinarily queer feeling. Lyall had told Isena that he was sure Jesco wouldn’t want letters or a visit to the asylum from him and his wife, and Isena offered to p
ass along Jesco’s answer should it differ.

  The world was changing. Some people changed with it. Yes, he would like to hear from Lyall, to know what kind of man he had become. Jesco still longed for his roots, and if his brother was extending a hand in friendship, then Jesco was going to take it. They could not help how they had been raised, and they were not who they had been long ago. Jesco would give him a chance. He would come out no worse than he had been before if Lyall still rejected him. If not, he had another member of his family back.

  He would never step out of the asylum’s front doors to see his whole family arriving for a visit. That was a dream that would not manifest. But how rich he felt when a carriage disgorged Isena and her children, and one day Lyall might be there, too.

  The storm had descended just as Scoth predicted, and all Jesco had had from him were terse though affectionate notes. The murder of Hasten Jibb was solved yet only gave birth to further cases. A fleet of seers was brought in for the bodies in the fields outside Torrus Kodolli’s Cantercaster home. Jesco was not one of them. His knife wound needed to heal. He hoped the cases wrapped up tidily and Scoth could step away when it was time to attend the whirly-gig convention.

  He received a visit from Tammie one day. She had brought along a framed plaque that the station received from Parliament. Scoth had received one for merit, as had Tammie, and this one was for Jesco. His name was printed in tall letters, and hanging underneath the glass was a medal. In their struggles to solve the murder of a courier, they had ended up taking down the largest distributor of rucaline in their region.